I've decided after good example to write some diary pages with toughts and events.
Oh, in case anybody fails to understand, I'd like to remind them that these pages are copyrighted, and that everything found here may not be redistributed in any other way then over this direct link without my prior consent. That includes family, christianity, and other cheats. The simple reason is that it may well be that some people have been ill informed because they've spread illegal 'copies' of my materials even with modifications. Apart from my moral judgement, that is illegal, and will be treated as such by me. Make as many references to these pages as you like, make hardcopies, but only of the whole page, including the html-references, and without changing a iota or tittel...
And if not? I won't hesitate to use legal means to correct wrong
that may be done otherwise. And I am serious. I usually am. I'm not sure
I could get 'attempt to grave emotional assault' out of it, but infrigement
on copyright rules is serious enough. And Jesus called upon us to respect
the authorities of state, so christians would of course never do such a
thing. Lying, imagine that.
I'll give a little overview of the latest devs in softwareland, since I did some installation and building jobs, and at least it is fun enough what now works, even though the machine can only just hold it all, both disc, memory and speedwise.
There are other, probably more important subjects in life, which I don't cover extensively now, but some comments seem appropriate and maybe of use, at least explanatory.
First: putting information on a row, or together, or whatever the right expression is for making a hard disc contain certain desired byte patterns on a row which are far more fun than others.
Seriously, that means I've stretched the portability test from 2 actual unix machine kinds (hp/ux and sun), over linux (on a compaq) over windows 95 and 98 (various machine kinds, with and without network) to macIntosh (mainly G3), and now back to windows 3.11, with the 322 extension.
That is something, and it get even better, because after slow and carefull but successfull running of the examples, I double clicked the bwise tcl file I happened to have around (an older version), which without changing a line of code brought up the bwise window.
Which is not a necessity of life, but more than fun and usefull enough application pieces and experiment can take place on it, and having it running on such a variety of machines with good results is remarkable. I made a little window to control the synth with to try wether that would work, and after similar work as I've done before (except that the mac doesn't allow it) I got 'exec' to work to drive some external programs to dump programs and transfer samples and other data to the microcomputer system.
Real time wasn't realy the term, it took seconds to start a process, but the idea did work inthe end, and maybe with some less applications running, things can get some faster, but in essence, I made decent buttons on the screen which when pressed load for instance a sample into the synth hardware.
It was possible to have a shell window as well, which still ran csound and the gnu compiler (at least for a little example), so of course I had to try starting csound but tcl as well, and indeed that too is possible, taking a batchfile as starting point I rendered a sample from tcl, not particularly slower then from dos, which can be made usefull of course for various purposes, without question score and orchestra files can be made easier with tcl and some menus and all that don't hurt either.
The main addition could be using the bwise canvas to graphically represent things, and then driving csound automatically, which is at least possible, because I tried the exec with a filled bwise window. So now I need to think what is a good way to go about this, that is most effective, and usefull. Maybe making the drumwindow work is fun enough, but not that challenging. The dx7 sounds don't need the graphical window, unless I'd make then editable, which gives me mental images that akmost make me hilarious, it might end as an editor with csound rendering for general dx sounds, which is completely worth it, but I should not push the limits of processing and interface speed.
Then again, some added popup menus (as I did before, except I don't have the code), and a general structure to csound possibility is more than little serious, I'll need to think about that.
When I was pushing trying some things together, seeing wether they would work, the result, including the synth driving window, gives this impression:
I was satisfied that after considerable effort, csound and the synth would be driven, though the latter takes sub-programs that with high memory usage take some time to start up. Making a dll could solve this, but that is pushingit a bit far, and seriously, I'd save that for window 95+ at least, if I'd do the effort, which makes for less portability.
On the graphics side of things, strictly under DOS, I've done the z buffer thing and made a straightforward button-list/menu work, and some 3d images, such as these:
Which is basically a left upper corner with z buffered 256 graytone image of a flat projection of a set of polygons, with arbitrary enough shading, the following examples have 'picking' of 3d objects, and instead of only smooth shaded polgons, spheres at the 'pick'-ed points, also after picking a sphere after it has been made, and again, etc. Speres are rendered in polar coordinate system to z buffer fashion with linear parameterisation in the two angles and no filling rasterizing.
The spheres have a shading which I used before, simply proportional to the angle of the normal with the viewing direction, so that is seems the object is lit from the camera direction.
To make some fun, and prepare for the even more serious application of efficient texture pattern representation for for instance radiosity lighting patterns, I made a few polygon textured scene.
And gosh, they're portable.
I've at least been speaking with some people in various environments, which is usually not bad, although it does make me wonder about many lets say public secrets that appearently are not to be much discussed. Of course I raised my own experiences, and lets say my christian angle on things as far as appropriate, which isn't bad, and various responses make me clear enough how much misery and results of misery there are in quite some lives, but that doesn't solve much, necessarily.
It's nice to play the piano at times, which maybe also doesn't solve much necessarily, except maybe denial of the normal social traffic to make an album or two, but is certainly can make me feel better, since I like playing, in various ways.
I just reassebled (computer term) the 16 step sequencer for the synth microcomputer sys, with the detune possibility, that is the running sequence, preferably with a fat analog simulation sound, can be detuned by playing the keyboard. With some effort, detuning for a few notes, or at well chosen spots in the sequence can make quite hefty things happen, realy, this beats most things I've heard in the area easily (not that there aren't other synths that would be up to it, I think some know the same trick). Fun.